Send Us Your Heathen Holiday Cards!

The holiday season is now upon us (and has been since…you know, October), and many families like to send out Christmas cards with showing off how attractive/amazing/adorable their selves/kids/cats are.

Now, even though we as a collective may not celebrate the Baby-Jesus-type Christmas, it doesn’t mean we don’t want to send a Season’s Greetings to our extended family and various Facebook friends, right? It is with this in mind that I am calling for your secular greeting card messages. They can be clever, sassy, funny, irreverent, cute, or punny! (I give bonus points to puns. Always, bonus points to puns.)

Send us your card ideas (or the best ones you’ve seen), and we’ll post our favorites throughout December! If you create/design cards or have the ability to draw up some of the submitted ideas, please let us know that, too.

I do a card exchange through a forum I belong to; one year someone sent postcards with the FSM decked out in colored lights. I’ve always wanted to do the “Axial tilt is the reason for the season” as a card but haven’t yet. This year I’m using up some of the mass of generic blank cards and holiday/snowflake stickers I aquired a couple years ago and making “stealth Christmas cards”…I haven’t decided what to write in them yet, though. I have some leftover (non-religious) Christmas cards I’ll use for my other friends, though.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/invisiblepinkunicorn Anna

That one’s cute! I always send out non-religious cards, but I’ve never chosen anything with an overt atheist message.

http://squeakysoapbox.com/ Rich Wilson

I know. Language evolves. But ‘heathen’ doesn’t mean what it once did.

Daniel

Can’t seem to find any spares, but one year I can some custom “Axial Tilt is the Reason for the Seasons” cards made up and sent them to friends I thought would appreciate them.

Gus Snarp

It doesn’t? What did it used to mean? For that matter, what does it mean now? Webster’s doesn’t give me any help, having a few very closely related definitions that all match what I think it means and no reference to any archaic versions…

http://squeakysoapbox.com/ Rich Wilson

Heathen was originally very much like ‘pagan’, and essentially referred to the non-Christians in areas where Christianity was spreading. Think “polytheist vs monotheist”. I think in current usage it refers to atheists (or at least has expanded to include atheists). You often hear “Godless Heathen”. I suppose “Godless Heathen” might be technically correct, but “godless Heathen” wouldn’t be under original usage, since they believed in gods.

And since Christianity spread to the cities first, it took on a kind of “dirty, uncivilized, unkept” association.

Stonyground

You can get Pagany Yuletide and Soltice cards from an outfit called Hedingham Fair.

In the UK, religious types and the right wing press have an annual moral panic about the unavailability of religious Christmas cards. In fact, Christian Christmas cards are freely available everywhere. It is just that they are always in the minority for the simple fact that they are not very popular.